Page Speed: Bloggers, get ready to conquer the world
I often tell bloggers that one of the biggest advantages they have being on Cucumbertown is page speed. And of course, I wasn’t taken seriously for that point. So what if the page speed was great? It’s an abstract metric that rarely gets the recognition it deserves. But as data analysts and engineers we always see the impact.
Over the last two months our engineering team rewrote all of Cucumbertown’s web pages and is now in the process of moving it to a CDN — Content Delivery Network.
My wife Jane’s blog was the guinea pig and the results are now out.
This is her traffic surging up.
And this is her web page load time
To put things into perspective, Jane did not do any social promotions, relies on almost all of her traffic from Google and she hasn’t written anything new in the past one month. Take a look at Jane’s blog
It’s unbelievably fast.
There’s some magic happening here. Read on for the details.
Normally when people talk about CDN, they usually mean making the images load fast. And sometimes that includes videos and other “static assets”. But with Cucumbertown’s case when we say CDN we mean the whole page including the recipe, posts and everything you see. For most bloggers this is extremely complicated and expensive to implement. Complicated because, let’s say when a comment is added to a page, the hundreds of webservers across the world will have to be updated with the new page in split seconds. This applies to comments, edits to pages, shares numbers and just about anything that can change in a page. Unless you are an engineer focused on this, it’s pretty difficult to get this right.
Then 2nd part is how expensive it is. To give you an example: Getting the SSL certificates to make your webpage “https” itself is close to $100 a year and with a CDN it’s close to 1500 dollars per month. That’s a lot of $$$$. It’s pretty expensive for us too but we are fanatically obsessed about making our webpages snappy.
There is also a bonus that comes with the new architecture. i.e. Your blog will never go down. That’s close to Six Sigma. Putting all of your content on a CDN means one of the hundreds of servers out there will serve your blog in the event of a major catastrophe.
CDN will be a paid feature but…
all of our existing food bloggers and those who are in the migration pipeline till January 2016 will get it for FREE! You trusted us early on and we’d like to reciprocate.
For the rest, this will be an optional upgradable feature. Don’t worry, even without a CDN you blog will pretty fast on Cucumbertown.
